Johnson Controls International plc

Good morning and welcome to the Johnson Control's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jim Lucas, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our conference call to discuss Johnson Control's first quarter fiscal 2024 results. The press release and related tables that were issued earlier this morning, as well as the conference call slide presentation, can be found on the Investor Relations portion of our website at johnsoncontrols.com. Joining me on the call today are Johnson Control's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, George Oliver, Chief Financial Officer, Olivier Leonetti, and newly appointed Chief Financial Officer, Mark Van Diepenbeck. Before we begin, let me remind you that during our presentation today, we will make forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by forward-looking statements due to a variety of risks and uncertainties. Please note that we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements even if the actual results or future expectations change materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for detailed discussions of these risks and uncertainties, in addition to the inherent limitations of such forward-looking statements. We will also reference certain non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are contained in the schedules attached to our press release and in the appendix to this presentation, both of which can be found on the investor relations section of Johnson Control's website. I will now turn the call over to George.

Thanks, Chairman. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the call today. Now, let's begin with slide three. We are gaining momentum as we exit the first quarter. Our team has been unbelievable in managing through the recent cyber disruption, which occurred early in the quarter. While it is challenging to comprehensively quantify the overall business impact as we recovered from the incident, we are back on track. In fact, over the course of the last 120 days since the cyber incident, We have connected with many of our key customers, solidifying already strong relationships and strengthening their trust and confidence in Johnson Controls. It is clear from their feedback that our value proposition continues to resonate and customers believe in our products and services. As we enter the new calendar year, we are seeing positive signs. During the quarter, we delivered solid first quarter results, generally in line with our forecast. The fundamentals of our business are strong, as we met expectations for sales, margins, and adjusted EPS in the face of headwinds from the cyber disruption, ongoing weakness in global residential HVAC, and significant slowing in China. Olivier will discuss the details of our financials more specifically later in the call. Looking forward, we expect fiscal 2024 to return to more normalized seasonality in our businesses and the operating environment to be more in line with what we saw prior to the pandemic and recent supply chain disruptions. Our position of building a leading digital building solutions platform continues to be core to our strategy, and we are pleased with the strength of our applied HVAC business, especially as we serve the fast-growing data center market. We are updating our fiscal 2024 guidance today, reducing the full year adjusted EPS range by five cents, reflecting growing headwinds in China. Our commercially focused portfolio and long cycle backlog driven businesses, in addition to our record backlog, gives us more clarity of improvement as fiscal 2024 progresses. Before we continue, I would like to take the time to thank Olivier for his partnership over the last few years and wish him the best of luck in the next chapter of his career. When Olivier informed me that he was taking a role outside the company, we implemented our internal succession plan, and I am very pleased that Mark Van Diepenbeek is assuming the role of CFO. Mark has been with Johnson Controls for nearly 20 years with increasing responsibility in finance roles, including CFO of Building Solutions North America. Last year, we moved Mark into an operating role as president of Amela. Mark brings deep finance expertise, an understanding of our customers, global markets, and operational knowledge. I am confident that we will continue to build on the foundations already in place, and I look forward to partnering with Mark in his new role. Now turning to slide four. I'd like to highlight the strong foundation of operational excellence that Johnson controls in our value creation framework. We are capturing the secular trends across sustainable and healthy buildings. We have the right strategy and operating system in place to create value for our shareholders. And as part of our commitment to discipline capital allocation, we remain focused on deploying resources to the right opportunities. Our team has made great progress the last two years creating a digital services model, and our investments have been a key enabler. The addition of FM systems gave us increased capabilities to serve our customers as they improve their workplace environments. Digital is a strong enabler to creating recurring revenue, retaining customers, and supporting higher sustainable service growth rates. Within service, we are changing the game from deploying a mechanical contractor to creating multiple options for our customers. We are increasing job size, improving margins, and creating scalable solutions. In addition, we are maximizing value creation through digitally enabled offerings and accelerating our lifecycle solutions entitlements across all of our domains. Our team's model has a strong foundation, and we will continue to accelerate the pace of change. At the same time, we have successfully removed many layers of cost across the organization, but we know there is more work to be done. We serve an incredible market, and it is on us to capitalize on the opportunities in front of us. We will continue to simplify and standardize across our portfolio. As we continue to focus on simplifying the company, we are always assessing opportunities to advance our transformation into a comprehensive solutions provider for commercial buildings. As part of the continuous evaluation of our portfolio, we are in the early stages of pursuing strategic alternatives of our non-commercial product lines in line with our objective to maximize value to our shareholders. We are very excited about our future and are confident we are on the right path to simplify our portfolio, drive margin expansion, deliver consistent cash flow while serving our customers in the best possible way. I will now turn the call over to Olivier to go through the financial details of the quarter.